NewGeo 2026

Overview

IP geolocation — the practice of mapping virtual IP addresses to physical locations — underpins a wide range of Internet services and operations, from content delivery and targeted advertising to regulatory compliance, fraud detection, policy enforcement, and law enforcement. Despite its pervasive use, the reliability, accuracy, and transparency of IP geolocation techniques, databases, and policies remain only partially understood. The December 2025 IAB Workshop on IP Address Geolocation surfaced fundamental open questions about accuracy and integrity, the limitations of self-publishing mechanisms such as geofeeds (RFC 8805), and architectural tensions between passive location inference and evolving privacy expectations, and its report explicitly recommends further research. At the same time, IPv6 adoption, VPNs and relay services, CGNAT, satellite-based access, and regulatory frameworks such as the EU’s GDPR and Digital Services Act all challenge current geolocation assumptions.

Yet there is no dedicated academic venue for measurement work on IP geolocation. Relevant papers appear sporadically across IMC, CoNEXT, PAM, TMA, SIGCOMM, and security conferences, but the community lacks a focused forum to consolidate findings, compare methodologies, benchmark datasets, and build shared infrastructure. NewGeo fills this gap by bringing together researchers, network operators, geolocation data providers, and policymakers in a structured workshop co-located with IMC.

News

• 2026-08-07: Workshop website launched.
• 2026-07-07: NewGeo was accepted as an ACM IMC 2026 workshop.

Call for Papers

IP geolocation is a foundational building block for Internet services, network operations, and regulatory compliance. Yet the mechanisms underpinning it — commercial geolocation databases, geofeeds, active probing, and latency-based inference — are insufficiently understood, inconsistently accurate, and increasingly challenged by architectural shifts in the Internet. NewGeo 2026 invites original research contributions that advance our understanding of IP geolocation through rigorous measurement and analysis.

Topics of Interest

We solicit short papers on topics including, but not limited to:

• Measurement and analysis of geofeeds and other IP geolocation databases
• Novel active and passive geolocation techniques that accommodate emerging Internet architectures (VPNs, relays, cellular and mobile, IPv6, CGNAT, address sharing, etc.)
• Geolocation challenges for satellite-based and deep space Internet access
• Ground truth collection methodologies and benchmark datasets
• Artificial Intelligence-based approaches for IP geolocation, validation, or verification
• Longitudinal studies of geolocation accuracy and database evolution
• Applications and implications of IP geolocation for content delivery, regulatory compliance, fraud detection, and censorship measurement
• Privacy implications of IP geolocation and location inference
• Reproducibility studies of previously published geolocation measurement work

Submission Guidelines

Submissions must be original work not previously published and not under review elsewhere. Papers must be at most 4 pages in length, excluding references with an optional one page appendix. Papers are to be formatted according to the ACM two-column sigconf style using the ACM template in letterpaper format with a font size of 10pt. You can use the following LaTeX documentclass:

\documentclass[10pt,sigconf,letterpaper,anonymous,nonacm]{acmart}

All submissions will undergo double-blind peer review by the program committee, i.e., submissions must be anonymised: omit author names and affiliations, and refer to your own prior work in the third person. Papers violating the submission guidelines will be desk-rejected. Accepted papers will be presented at the workshop, and at least one author of each paper is expected to attend in-person.

Authors must adhere to the ACM’s author guidelines on the use of Generative AI. See the IMC 2026 submission instructions for general formatting guidance.

Authors are encouraged to make their measurement data and analysis code available to support reproducibility.

Submission Site

Submissions will be handled via HotCRP. The submission URL will be announced here.

Important Dates

All deadlines are 23:59 AoE (UTC−12).

Program

TBD — the workshop program will be announced here once the accepted papers and scheduling are confirmed.

Committee

Workshop Chairs

Program Committee

Venue & Attendance

NewGeo 2026 takes place on Monday, October 12, 2026, co-located with ACM IMC 2026 in Karlsruhe, Germany. The exact room is still TBD and will be announced ahead of the workshop.

Attendance is handled through the standard IMC 2026 registration process. NewGeo is also listed among the IMC 2026 co-located events.

The workshop welcomes participation from academic researchers, network operators, geolocation data providers, RIR staff, Internet standardization contributors, and policymakers.

Contact

For questions about the workshop, please contact the chairs: Oliver Gasser and Robert Beverly.